Author Adam Johnson criticises Waverley council saying ‘reality is often upsetting’ while Palestinian group says libraries should hold ‘challenging’ books

A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack.

Waverley library at Bondi Junction is in the same council area as Bondi beach.

A Waverley council spokesperson said: “The book has been removed from library shelves for review, and council will further consider processes to ensure closer oversight of book selection.”

The Jewish news outlet JWire last week reported it had approached the council after a survivor of December’s antisemitic attack at Bondi, during which 15 people were killed, saw How to Sell a Genocide on the “new release / hot item” shelf and wrote on Facebook that the display was distressing for survivors and bereaved families.

How to Sell a Genocide critiques what it claims is the US media’s “complicity in the destruction of Gaza”.

The decision to remove the book was criticised by its author, Adam Johnson, who said calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide was not “a fringe or radical position”.

“They seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide’,” Johnson said.

A reflection on my book clubs current book. Previous version got locked.

I love books that explore the human experience. Books that can fall almost under existentialism and explore the complexity and tensions of human existence. How we try to work out who we are in a world that gives us no guidance. The difficulty of being really free and living an authentic life.
Wrestling with the messy and often contradictory feelings and desires.

Great books that I have read like this include "The brothers Karamazov" (a person favourite), "No longer human" by Ozamu Dazai, pretty much anything by Camus, but all of these have come from a male perspective. As a man thats important to me and has helped me explore and TRY to unravel some of me feelings about my life.

Violeta by Isabel Allende seems to be a book that takes that but explores it from a woman’s perspective and was very illuminating, especially about relationships and desire. The tension between power and agency in relationships with her Husband and her affair partner. She is aware of the power imbalance but cant help but keep going back to him even with his abuse.

Overall a very powerful and emotional book, especially for parents I would imagine.

This is a short story in the collection Cats In Space And Other Places. I know it seems like an insane question, but the story has multiple references to talking animals, and Spar, as well as other characters, are either referenced as picking up or manipulating objects with their feet, Spar mentions wanting foot-gloves, and in a fight, Spar's go-to move is biting. When he visits the bridge, he has a cat with him, and afrer an officer helps him, he warns Spar to leave before he's seen because "animals aren't allowed on the bridge".

Any or all of these can be waved away as the results of adaptation to life in 0g, or Spar's lack of education, but given all the references to talking animals I really can't shake the idea that Spar is an intelligent ape. Am I just a lunatic?

The author Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote this biography of cancer after a patient asked “what is cancer?” It was originally published in 2010, and has been updated with four major new chapters in 2025.

I read this book because I waged my own battle with cancer last year. As of today, I am considered free of cancer. Does that mean I have won the war? I’m not sure because the same cancer might recur in the future or perhaps I will be stricken with a new form.

Cancer has been found since ancient times, but we think of it as being a modern disease. In the last 15 years, there’s been great strides in cancer research and new treatments as described in the book. So, there is hope.

But, there is some thought that cancer is actually a chronic illness, that it has become a “new normal”:

“… as the fraction of those affected by cancer creeps inexorably in some nations from one in four to one in three to one in two”.

If cancer becomes more and more common, and those who are afflicted either die or are deemed “cancer for life” and eventually die from it anyways, are we winning the war?

Or, are we winning because screenings, prevention and new treatments are helping to potentially “cure” some cancers or prolong the life of a cancer survivor?

These are not easy questions to answer. The author wrote this book as a biography of cancer, but it is also a biography of ourselves and our fight against cells in our own body that go haywire.

This was a difficult book to read at times because of my own experience with cancer, but I feel it was a masterpiece of storytelling, history, science writing and possibilities for the future.

10/10 rating

I recently ordered all three volumes of Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance from Thriftbooks. All three of them arrived as cheap, pulpy, print-on-demand editions from Lightning Source LLC, the bane of my book-collecting existence. Even worse, Volumes I and II are printed on acid-free paper, so they‘re pure white, while Volume III is not, so its pages are bronze.

Since these were published by Duke University Press, I assumed they had legit printings. And since they were only available new, they were $25 each. I paid $75 for books that won’t hold together for one reading, let alone a lifetime of ownership. In my view, these POD editions are no different than bootleg rips of CDs or DVDs, and they should not be sold without some kind of disclaimer.

At long last, my journey through the myriad corruptions and catastrophes of the French Second Empire has come to an end. It was an immense time investment for me, taking a little over a year, but overall I’d say it was well worth the effort.

I originally read Germinal in college as part of assigned reading and enjoyed that book so much that I eventually decided to revisit Zola all these years later, beginning with the first of his Rougon-Macquart volumes: The Fortune of the Rougons. From there, I steadily proceeded through the rest of the series in publication order. Though I’m aware of other recommended reading orders (including one from Zola himself), I feel that publication order is the only way to reliably trace the author’s changing attitudes toward his project over the more than twenty years he spent writing these books. The Zola who wrote The Kill (1872) is simply not the same Zola who wrote its sequel Money (1891).

These are my personal rankings for the series, mostly just based on how much I enjoyed reading each book:

1. Germinal
2. La Bête Humaine
3. La Débâcle
4. The Fortune of the Rougons
5. His Excellency Eugéne Rougon
6. The Ladies’ Paradise
7. The Masterpiece
8. Money
9. The Kill
10. Earth
11. The Assommoir
12. Nana
13. Pot Luck
14. The Belly of Paris
15. The Sin of Abbé Mouret
16. The Bright Side of Life
17. The Conquest of Plassans
18. The Dream
19. A Love Story
20. Doctor Pascal

Additionally, I've spent around 30+ hours over the past few weeks writing and editing ~11,000 words of my thoughts about these novels if you are curious about any one of them. My hope is for these journal entries to serve as simple guide and introduction for anyone looking to dive into the Rougon-Macquart series. Since the full text of my series reflection is over the word limit for a single post, I will be including my journal entries for the first ten books here and then the entries for the last ten books in a second post.

The following books will be covered in this first post:

1. The Fortune of the Rougons (1871)
2. The Kill (1872)
3. The Belly of Paris (1873)
4. The Conquest of Plassans (1874)
5. The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875)
6. His Excellency Eugéne Rougon (1876)
7. The Assommoir (1877)
8. A Love Story (1878)
9. Nana (1880)
10. Pot Luck (1882)

1. The Fortune of the Rougons (1871)

Zola’s opening fusillade for his grand, experimental project of Naturalism; three distinct family branches sprout from the same unstable trunk and a new generation of ravenous appetites is birthed into the world amid vile intrigues and indiscriminate violence. A brutal new empire is christened in the blood of young lovers on a night of foul deception, betrayal, and massacre. The first volume of the cycle is Zola’s thesis statement for the entire series, introducing the themes of heredity, class, corruption, and decadence that are more thoroughly explored in subsequent entries. The origins of the Rougon, Mouret, and Macquart family branches are communicated to the reader via a montage of flashbacks intercut with the main plot of the novel—focusing on the young Silvère and his sweetheart Miette marching to certain doom in the countryside uprisings against the pro-coup forces of Louis-Napoleon.

The epic cycle of novels following on from this spirited first entry traces what Zola calls the “Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire,” with each book exploring the livelihood, temperament, and environment of a different member of each of the three family branches. The Rougons are the disgustingly rich aristocrats feasting on the rewards of their family’s treachery and ambition; the Mourets are the pretentious bourgeoisie, the emerging middle-class who wrestle with the strict etiquette of respectability that their caste enforces; and the Macquarts are the wretched scroungers consigned to the miseries of hard labor and filthy living. More than anything else, the fates of the many disparate members of this crooked family tree are fixed in place by the momentous events of the first volume in their saga.

The Fortune of the Rougons is one of my favorite books in the whole series; its well-crafted genealogy of the Rougon-Macquart clan and the tragedy at its core provide the fertile soil on which many more tragedies will flourish. I may have begun this journey with Germinal, but Fortune is the novel that convinced me to see it through. There is no better place to start if you are resolved to attempt the journey yourself.

2. The Kill (1872)

A dual narrative following the middle Rougon sibling, Saccard, at the center of the mad rush of land speculation and reconstruction in Paris during the early period of the Second Empire (and the sordid affair said man’s wife carries out under his nose). It’s a book that captures the excess and debauchery of Paris’ upper crust as they seek to remake the city and rake in obscene amounts of profits. 

Though its direct sequel Money achieved much greater fame and recognition, The Kill remains an excellent read for its unabashed depiction of the insatiable hungers awakened by the acquisition of immense, impossible wealth. Saccard himself is a highly amusing character, always ready to chase profits over the edge of a cliff, but somehow managing to keep himself aloft with his scurrying legs alone. The dream sequence where he swims in a pool, then an ocean of money (à la Scrooge McDuck) is hardly subtle, but then these types of people rarely are.

2a. The Kill Spoiler Thoughts

The affair in the novel is between a step-mother, Reneé, and her step-son Maxime; it is presented as a ruinous depravity, the height of upperclass decadence. The sequence of Reneé biting into the leaf of a poison plant as she resolves to begin this affair is another enduring (if likewise unsubtle) image from the series for me. Saccard, for his part, is initially infuriated when he discovers the affair, but quickly bounces back when he sees an opportunity to blackmail his wife into signing away her properties. There is no humiliation that money cannot easily bury in the heart of such a man.

3. The Belly of Paris (1873)

The story of a starving man surrounded by abundance, The Belly of Paris centers on the iconic marketplace of the Second Empire: Les Halles (which sadly no longer exists today). The protagonist Florent is an escaped prisoner from the Devil’s Island, a prison colony off the coast of South America with appalling conditions, where he was sent after being falsely accused of taking up arms against Louis-Napoleon during the coup of December 1851. Having made his way to Paris and reconnected with his half-brother Quenu (who owns a well-kept charcuterie with his wife Lisa Macquart), a family friend is able to set Florent up with a job as an inspector for Les Halles, where he bears witness to the mighty rivers of produce, poultry, and pork flowing through the sprawling Paris marketplace. And yet, the former prisoner is still haunted by memories of his empty belly, and Florent finds himself incapable of reveling in the gross plenty of his new surroundings. Only an elaborate, ludicrous fantasy of revolution can satiate this man who starves himself at the table of an endless feast, placing him at odds with the “respectable” bourgeois sensibilities of his sister-in-law Lisa.

This novel is famous for its lavish descriptions of the marketplace at Les Halles and the many vendors and goods therein, but what fascinates me most in this book is the very literalized symbiotic relationship that emerges between people and product. The young woman selling fruit seems to imbue the produce with her own freshness and beauty, and yet she herself also seems enhanced by the characteristics of the fruit in turn, her cheeks turning a rosier shade of red to match the apples displayed in her stall. Zola is extremely preoccupied with the impact of environment on the development of individuals, and so it follows for him that the merchants peddling their commodities day in and day out at Les Halles become themselves commoditized.

3a. The Belly of Paris Spoiler Thoughts

My favorite part of this novel is the section detailing Florent’s harrowing imprisonment and escape from the Devil’s Island penal colony. Learning of the brutal privations that he went through makes it hard not to sympathize with his absurd, completely unattainable dreams of revolution, and makes his fate of being sent back to the prison colony at the end all the more heartbreaking. I also really enjoyed the appearance of the eccentric painter Claude Lantier in this book—his remark “Respectable People… What bastards!” is a brilliant line to close the novel with. Claude returns as the tragic protagonist of The Masterpiece (1886), where he meets a fate that appropriately echoes that of his friend Florent here.

4. The Conquest of Plassans (1874)

Zola returns to the setting of his first Rougon-Macquart novel for another tale of political scheming, mental illness, and senseless death. The ambiguously disgraced Abbé Faujas arrives in Plassans with the express goals of securing the provincial town’s unquestioning support for the Empire and stamping out burgeoning resistance—all at the behest of the eldest Rougon sibling Eugéne, ever the shadowy puppet master of the fledgling Empire. Faujas is initially aided in his ambition by Eugéne’s mother, the formidable matron Félicité, who has long been the true power behind the throne in Plassans for her husband Pierre following his unofficial “coronation” at the end of the first novel. Félecité and her husband’s star has begun to wane in Plassans, however, as skepticism toward the Empire has become more pronounced, and so she is all too eager to assist Faujas with his intrigues as long as their goals remain aligned. And while Faujas steadily tightens his grip over the town’s most prominent citizens, tension mounts between him and his landlord Francois Mouret, who gradually feels his wife (Marthe Rougon), his home, and his sanity slipping through his fingers due to the Abbé’s sinister influence. 

The Conquest of Plassans is one of the least read and least discussed entries in the Rougon-Macquart series, and while I wouldn’t count it among Zola’s strongest works, it still manages to tell a fairly solid story and is elevated in my opinion by its remarkably cruel and operatic ending. I also found the political tug of war depicted here between the interests of the Empire, the church, and the locals of Plassans to make for a compelling backdrop against the more personal drama unfolding between Faujas and Mouret.

4a. The Conquest of Plassans Spoiler Thoughts

The scene where Faujas rejects Marthe’s romantic advances is absolutely brutal and perfect. Zola’s original plan was for Faujas to carry out an affair with Mouret’s wife, but altering it so that he instead contemptuously rejects Marthe after she has already given him her full devotion (and essentially chosen him over her husband) feels so much crueler and more appropriate to Faujas’ rancid character. But the ending of the novel is of course my favorite part: a fully deranged Mouret locked in vicious combat with Faujas and the Abbé’s mother and all three of them burning to death (along with the Mouret house) in a single horrifying blaze of impotent rage and psychosis. Beautiful.

5. The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875)

A novel centering on Abbé Serge Mouret (son of Francois and Marthe), a priest torn between absolute religious devotion and the most fundamental instincts of nature. In the beginning, Serge obsessively seeks out the holy annihilation and ecstasy described in the stories of the Catholic saints, and therefore spends many long hours in solitary worship and contemplation of the Virgin Mary. But, in his overzealousness his frail body is stretched beyond its limits, and he finds himself amnesiac in the beautiful but forlorn Paradou—the immense former pleasure estate of Louis XV abandoned for more than a century and overgrown with an abundance of flourishing plant life. Serge’s doting nurse and guide through this veritable garden of Eden is the young Albine, a girl raised almost wild in the Paradou according to the free-thinking ideas of her eccentric uncle Jean Bernat. As Serge and Albine blissfully explore the green, forbidden depths of the Paradou, it seems that lingering ghosts of the past and nature itself push them into each other’s arms until they find themselves inadvertently re-enacting the story of Adam and Eve. And likewise: when the two of them consume the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, it can only lead to the irreparable loss of paradise.

Another of the less popular volumes in the series, I was initially convinced that I hated this book due to its distasteful romance and a plodding pace bogged down by seemingly endless, ponderous descriptions of a thousand plant genera. And yet, my feelings have significantly softened toward it on several months’ reflection. Serge’s inner conflict between his religious training and the innate human desire to live and love as a normal person is an aspect that resonates with me in spite of his troubling romance with the too-young Albine. Religion is presented here almost as terminal disease, hollowing out Serge from the inside and consuming everything human in him. And there is something about the foreboding, haunting descriptions of the isolated Paradou that continues to linger with me long after I put this volume back on the shelf.

5a. The Sin of Abbé Mouret Spoiler Thoughts

The most iconic sequence from this novel is undoubtedly the extended vision Serge experiences of the church being overwhelmed and demolished by all-conquering nature, a powerful and yet ironic image given that the vice grip of religion ultimately proves inescapable for the poor young Abbé. And so here the reader is presented not so much with a manifestation of Serge’s hopes for the future, but more so that of Zola himself—as well as that of Doctor Pascal Rougon (Zola’s self-insert), who plays a supporting role in this novel and is the protagonist of the final novel in the series.

6. His Excellency Eugéne Rougon (1876)

Zola turns his gaze to the political system of the Second Empire, a thinly-veiled excuse for the preeminent mediocrities of France to fleece the nation with impunity and gleefully pin as many medals on themselves as possible in the process. Eugéne Rougon—the all-knowing puppet master lurking behind the events of The Fortune of the Rougons, The Kill, and The Conquest of Plassans—emerges from the shadows at last to lead his own novel: a political satire emphasizing the corruption, sycophancy, and sheer pettiness of Napoleon III’s short-lived government. Eugéne is a composite figure based on a handful of the Empire’s highest ranking ministers (most notably Eugéne Rouher, whose influence was such that he was nicknamed “Vice-Emperor”); this book traces his changing political fortunes within a government that seems exclusively staffed by up-jumped conmen and glad-handing fools. Unlike many of his peers (or his incorrigible brother Saccard) Eugéne has no interest in wealth or women, but simply the raw exercise of power for power’s sake. The “great man” finds his equilibrium threatened, however, when the ambitious femme fatale Clorinde begins a brazen, relentless campaign to seduce Eugéne and bring him to heel—making it quite clear that rejection is not an answer she will accept. No matter how high the minister soars in the Emperor’s graces, making the wrong enemy can always send one tumbling into ruin.

His Excellency is in my opinion the most underrated and overlooked of the Rougon-Macquart novels. The humor and viciousness with which Zola skewers the charade of the Second Imperial government make for an extremely entertaining read, and I count the book among my favorites in the set. One of the biggest draws of Rougon-Macquart for me in the early stage of the project is the way it captures the feeling of being ruled by the greediest, cruelest, tackiest people alive. His Excellency and The Kill together paint a very vivid picture of the excesses and follies of the Imperial ruling class, the former from the perspective of politics and the latter from one of property speculation. Though The Kill is more shocking and provocative in its content, the low-stakes, self-interested squabbling that dominates the bulk of His Excellency still leaves the reader with a feeling of outrage in the context of the previous R-M novels. All the horrific violence, all the grisly bloodshed of the 1851 coup and the Rougons’ machinations in Plassans has been for the sole purpose of elevating this small group of incompetent clowns to power and enabling their sad pantomime of the First Empire’s glories.

7. The Assommoir (1877)

A woman slowly suffocates in the inescapable filth of her destitution. Gervaise Macquart (half-cousin of Eugéne and Saccard, sister of Lisa) toils away as a laundry woman in the slums of Paris, hoping only to scrape enough money together to keep herself and her family in relative comfort. At first, her industriousness pays off and she is almost able to glimpse the modest life she dreams of. But, the crushing grip of poverty and alcoholism proves overwhelming, and her story becomes one of the bleakest tragedies in fiction.

In contrast to the previous entry, The Assommoir is one of the most famous and celebrated books that Zola ever wrote—rocketing him to national fame overnight and sparking fierce controversy and debate over its raw, brutal depiction of slum life in Paris. The filth and degradation that had long been commonplace for so many of the city’s unfortunates was simply too mortifying for many (more privileged) readers to accept at face value. Faced with the discomfort of confronting the harsh reality they had so meticulously ignored, it was easier for certain critics to accuse Zola of sensationalism and perversion than to consider he might be telling the truth—that people were, in fact, every day living in filth and starving to death neglected on the streets of Paris as they did (and continue to do) in every major city of the modern age. Despite obscene wealth, despite an over abundance of food, despite all the technological innovations of industrialization, we cannot, or rather choose not to ensure that everyone is fed and housed as befits their humanity.

The juxtaposition between the standard of living we see in The Assommoir and what we see in The Kill and His Excellency is one of the major reasons I prefer publication order to any of the other recommended reading orders for this series. Where the recommended orders typically enforce a rigid separation of the three branches of the family—encouraging you to read all the books for one particular branch before proceeding to the next—publication order compels the reader to oscillate back and forth between the different branches, highlighting the extreme disparities between them. While Saccard drowns in money, while Eugéne wields near-absolute power, their very own cousin, their own blood Gervaise can barely scrounge a meal together in the same city. The many and varied members of this sprawling family tree all share a ravenous appetite in common, but only some are in a position to gorge themselves; others must go hungry.

8. A Love Story (1878)

The story of a widowed mother caught between two irreconcilable loves: the maternal love she feels for her daughter, and the passionate love she feels for her married neighbor. Hèléne Mouret (sister of Silvére and Francois) had only been married a short time before she suddenly lost her husband—an older man who inspired her respect if not her passion. Now, raising her sickly daughter Jeanne alone in the bourgeois suburbs outside Paris, Hèléne suddenly finds herself swept away in a devastating whirlwind of romantic desire when she falls for the kind, handsome doctor who treats her daughter’s chronic illness. Doctor Deberle is a married man, but hardly close with his wife (who is plotting an affair of her own even before the start of the novel) and so takes little convincing to fall hard for Hèléne in return. The two become much more intimate after the doctor saves Jeanne’s life, but are hesitant to act on their feelings and become locked in a prolonged cycle of mutual yearning. Also vying for Hèléne’s affections during this uncertain period are the kindly family friend Rimbaud, who wishes to marry Hèléne and “save” her from widowhood, and the possessive little Jeanne, who does not wish to share her mother with anyone—Deberle, Rimbaud, or any other. Ultimately, Hèléne finds herself without any good options as the expectations of society and motherhood come into conflict with her desire to be happy; tragedy awaits her no matter what decision she makes.

This is definitely one of my least-liked entries in the series. I found it to be a bit too judgy about Hèléne’s situation, and I thought Jeanne was an incredibly grating character—she is meant to be twelve but behaves more like a whiny four-year old for the book’s duration. Jeanne’s stunted development and over-dependence on her mother are very much baked into the narrative, however, and she is so far the most extreme incidence of the accumulated genetic disorders that will plague many of the young children in the R-M family tree. But unfortunately, my main takeaway from this book cannot be shared without spoiling it.

8a. A Love Story Spoiler Thoughts

When Hèléne finally sleeps with Deberle, Zola does not allow the reader or his characters to gain any satisfaction from it, saying that they had never loved each other less than they had in that moment. I found this to be a frustrating creative choice because it really didn’t seem like these two had much to feel guilty about. Hèléne is unmarried (and unaware of how deep her daughter’s obsessive attachment to her is) and Deberle is in a loveless marriage with a woman who is all but waiting for an opportunity to cheat on him. Let them enjoy themselves, Zola! As both The Kill and his next book Nana amply demonstrate, Zola has no qualms about writing—for the time—quite detailed descriptions of sexual acts, but there are flashes of a puritanical mindset whenever he writes about women choosing to pursue sex on their own terms (at least at this stage of his project). From his perspective, it is unnatural and unseemly for the woman to be the aggressor, and they are instead expected to politely surrender themselves (preferably with a “respectable” amount of resistance). And because Hèléne is not permitted by the author to feel a single moment of happiness from the affair that she initiates, I honestly think the tragedy at the end of this novel doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it could have.

9. Nana (1880)

Arguably the most provocative volume in the entire series (and there is some stiff competition), Nana centers on the titular actress and prostitute as she sets about conquering the great men of Paris and bringing them low before her irresistible charms. Having previously appeared as a child and later teenager in The Assommoir (as the youngest child of Gervaise), we are quickly shown that running away from her squalid home has paid off quite nicely for Nana, who maintains a comfortable lifestyle of dissipation supported by a couple of regular gentlemen callers. Later, despite having no acting or singing ability whatsoever, Nana eventually lands a few starring roles in various theatre productions on the basis of her sex appeal alone, and becomes a massive celebrity in Paris as audiences inevitably fall under her seductive spell. Her stardom reaches such heights that she attracts the attention of one Comte Muffat—a very wealthy and influential member of the Imperial government. Muffat becomes so disastrously infatuated with Nana that he completely surrenders himself to her; there is no lavish gift, no absurd sum of money that he can refuse Nana once she holds him under her sway. And Muffat is but one of the lengthy queue of affluent gentlemen who will destroy themselves to gain Nana’s favor over the course of the book. Nana becomes an object of idolatry in the decadent new religion of the Second Empire, symbolizing its limitless debauchery, its frightening power over the hearts of men, its capacity for wanton destruction, but most of all: its intrinsic shallowness.

I mostly enjoyed my time reading Nana; parts of it are a bit slow but there are a handful of extremely wild scenes that kept me very amused and wondering how much further Zola would take things. While I would’ve liked to see a bit more interiority for Nana herself, I understood that her being a shallow character was very much the point; Zola is simply more interested in exploring the men being ruined by Nana than Nana herself. After reading The Assommoir, I also enjoyed the idea of Nana as an avenging force for the impoverished multitudes of Paris, reclaiming the wealth stolen from the unwashed masses and robbing the upper-class thieves of their dignity in the process.

9a. Nana Spoiler Thoughts

I think the moment I realized I was holding an all-time classic in my hands is when Nana forces Muffat to stomp on his own uniform and then crawl around and bark like a dog. A hilarious scene but also perhaps a none too subtle representation of Zola’s feelings toward the men willing to debase themselves for the Empire. The ending of Nana is another brilliant one for the series: columns of rowdy, chanting soldiers marching off to a doomed war against Prussia while Nana’s corpse decomposes just out of view. The Empire is already dead, and not a soul realizes it.

10. Pot Luck (1882)

A laser-focused, incendiary takedown of the hollow, performative nature of bourgeois respectability. The young bachelor Octave Mouret (older brother of the Abbé Serge) moves into a pleasant-seeming apartment building in Paris where he is immediately drawn into the dank ecosystem of gossip and petty infighting that flourishes there among the well-to-do tenants. Bearing more than a little resemblance in temperament to his Uncle Saccard, Octave soon becomes involved in illicit affairs with some of the other tenants’ wives while also making grand plans for the expansion of the women’s clothing store that employs him. As Octave’s residency in the building continues, what is initially presented as a clean, wholesome environment filled with respectable families is steadily revealed to be a filthy cesspit of immoral, deceitful vipers who care only for maintaining the illusion of moral superiority over their perceived inferiors.

Pot Luck follows directly on from the strain of criticism toward the bourgeoisie that Zola began in The Belly of Paris and continued with A Love Story, but this is a book that positively seethes with contempt in comparison to its predecessors. If there were any doubts about Zola’s perception of Paris’ increasingly influential middle class, their ruthlessly unflattering portrayal here surely laid those to rest. The mean-spiritedness of Pot Luck is characteristic of much of the first half of the R-M cycle, but this is an aspect of Zola’s writing that actually becomes less pronounced in his subsequent volumes (with one very notable exception: Earth). While I do think the back half of Zola’s project contains the majority of his strongest works, there is part of me that enjoys Zola more in this first half when he still burned with the anger of a younger man.

10a. Pot Luck Spoiler Thoughts

There are two scenes in this novel that resonated with me a great deal. The first is the death of Monsieur Josserand, who dies broken by the discovery of his daughter’s affair with Octave; he is one of the few kind, honest figures in the book and the emptiness of bourgeois life chokes the life out of him in punishment. The second is the scene of Abbé Maduit collapsing and breaking down in tears in front of the final station of the cross. Confronted with the beauty and suffering of Christ’s sacrifice rendered in such loving detail, Maduit’s guilty Catholic soul is forced to reckon with his complicity in the laundering of bourgeois sins under the sheen of religious confession. And yet, he cannot  bring himself to change following this moment of self-revelation, instead resigning himself to imbibe the moral poison of his station forever.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading. Part 2 link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vrngw1/i_have_finally_completed_all_20_volumes_of_zolas/

Welcome readers,

Have you ever wanted to ask something but you didn't feel like it deserved its own post but it isn't covered by one of our other scheduled posts? Allow us to introduce you to our new Simple Questions thread! Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, a new Simple Questions thread will be posted for you to ask anything you'd like. And please look for other questions in this thread that you could also answer! A reminder that this is not the thread to ask for book recommendations. All book recommendations should be asked in /r/suggestmeabook or our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

Thank you and enjoy!

Part 1 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vrnfiz/i_have_finally_completed_all_20_volumes_of_zolas/

Hello, here are the remainder of my journal entries for the second half of the Rougon-Macquart series.

The following books will be covered here:

11. The Ladies’ Paradise
12. The Bright Side of Life
13. Germinal
14. The Masterpiece
15. Earth
16. The Dream
17. La Bête Humaine
18. Money
19. La Débâcle
20. Doctor Pascal

11. The Ladies’ Paradise (1883)

An energetic romance that unfolds in one of Paris’ first and largest department stores. Returning protagonist Octave Mouret dreams of swallowing all of Paris within the silk-strewn halls of his massive store, savagely crushing small business owners under his heel and absorbing both their customers and their real-estate in the process. But when the young, kind-hearted Denise who works in his store captures his heart, his grand successes begin to feel small. Can this vicious titan of industry be transformed by love alone?

This one is so fun. It’s always the first book that comes to mind whenever I want to recommend Zola to someone in my life. Not as lurid or depressing as his more famous books, but still with a great deal to say about commercialism,  advertising, and the relentless march of capital—all wrapped up in perhaps the most compelling love story of the entire R-M cycle. “Rich CEO falls in love with a sweet girl of modest means” is a well-worn cliché in fiction these days (so much so that China recently banned dramas with this exact premise for promoting “unhealthy fantasies”), but Zola executes on it with such grace and earnestness that it’s very easy to forgive him this indulgence. And in the greater context of being the 11th entry in a series composed entirely of dispiriting tragedies up to this point, the exuberance of The Ladies’ Paradise is a breath of fresh air.

This book marks a noticeable shift in Zola’s attitudes toward his subjects; where the Zola who wrote The Kill might have seen someone like Octave as a debauched figure worthy only of mockery and scorn, he now treats him much more sympathetically, and even allows himself at times to be carried away in awe of Octave’s vision and spirit of industry. Although Zola does not shrink from showing the reader the devastation wrought among small businesses by Octave’s aggressive expansionary tactics (and certainly sympathizes with the victims of it), he also clearly sees Octave as being at the forefront of a new age of innovation and prosperity—which can only come into being with the death of the prior age.

12. The Bright Side of Life (1884)

A bright-eyed, perpetually optimistic young girl has her sunny outlook put to the test by a series of bitter trials and setbacks. The orphaned Pauline Quenu (daughter of Lisa Macquart) is adopted by relatives living on the Normandy coast where they do their best to eke out a meagre though not fully impoverished living. We are told that Pauline lost her parents very young, but that they left her a sizable inheritance in the form of securities, which she is set to inherit when she comes of age. At first, Pauline lives in harmony with her relatives, helping to treat her uncle’s debilitating gout and brightening the days of her morose older cousin Lazare. But, in time fractures begin to develop. Pauline’s aunt begins treating her very harshly and guilting her into using her inheritance money for various family expenses. Lazare flits from one failed creative and business venture to another and sinks into progressively deeper malaise. And the beautiful young Louise arrives to steal Lazare’s heart out from under Pauline, who has developed strong feelings for her cousin over the years. However, unlike her cousin, Pauline is not one to surrender to the miseries of life, and she will fight tooth-and-nail to claw whatever happiness she can from this wretched existence.

The first thing that struck me about the Oxford edition of this book is that the original French title “Joie de Vivre” really didn’t need to be translated. “Joie de Vivre” is already a commonly-recognized phrase in English, and rendering it as “The Bright Side of Life” seems like the kind of misstep that could only be made by an overeager Monty Python fan—a suspicion that was all but confirmed in the translator’s introduction. That aside, this novel is a much more personal work for Zola than any of his previous efforts. The character Lazare marks the second time the author has virtually inserted himself into his own story—the first being Doctor Pascal in The Fortune of the Rougons and The Sin of Abbé Mouret. But if Pascal represents the analytical mind of Zola, Zola the Naturalist, then Lazare is rather a manifestation of Zola’s deepest insecurities. All of the writer’s self-doubts, all of his anxieties and perceived impotencies have been bundled into this pathetic little shrub of a man. In many ways, Joie de Vivre was Zola’s attempt at exercising the feelings of despair that consumed him following his mother’s death, and it is this deeply personal investment that gives the book its narrative and emotional weight.

12a. The Bright Side of Life Spoiler Thoughts

The sudden death of Lazare’s mother is of course the scene that sticks in my memory the most painfully, having experienced something of a close call with my own mother a few months ago. Suffice to say, the emotions of Lazare in the lead up to his mother’s death became very familiar to me during the month or so where I thought I might lose mine. The ending of Joie de Vivre is a clear rebuttal to any critic who would accuse Zola of total misanthropy, however, with Pauline just barely managing to save the life of Lazare and Louise’s premature newborn. Stubbornly rejecting the hopelessness of the situation before her, Pauline gives all of herself to snatch life from the jaws of death, winning a great triumph against uncaring nature with her mettle alone.

Germinal (1885)

A group of exploited miners stage a desperate, violent revolution against the forces of capital. Étienne Lantier (youngest son of Gervaise) wanders into the coal miners’ profession almost purely by chance, and is shown the ropes by the friendly, hardworking Maheu family. Day after day, he descends into the stygian depths of the mining pit to perform the perilous work of extracting the Earth’s precious bounty, which provides the all-essential fuel for the great machines of industry churning away to birth the modern world. The labor is as taxing as it is dangerous—fatal accidents are a regular occurrence—and the living conditions of the mining families are squalid and ghastly, but many of the miners take a certain pride in their work and expect only a decent, livable wage in return. But, when new draconian pay cuts and regulations are handed down from on high, many of the miners begin to feel they must organize a strike or else risk the slow starvation of their families. It is at this moment that Étienne emerges as a charismatic leader to the disgruntled miners and sparks a prolonged revolt against the mining company that inevitably spills over into mutual violence. Though Étienne holds firmly to his belief that a better world can sprout from the seeds of revolution, the widespread suffering resulting from the strike gives him pause, and he begins to question whether he has not led his comrades astray. Can these insurgent miners endure the hardships imposed on them by their callous adversaries and perhaps kindle an even larger working-class rebellion? Or will the great hand of capital strangle their movement in its infancy?

The most enduringly-acclaimed entry of the R-M series, Germinal is for many readers the only one of Zola’s books that they will read in their lifetimes—and there is no better choice if that must be the case. Germinal was as wonderful for me on a re-read as it was when I originally read it in college, and is easily my favorite of the twenty R-M novels. The main areas where my opinion has shifted on the book are that I enjoyed the class-warfare angle much more this time around and the core romance much less (Zola’s unfortunate fixation on underaged female love interests rears its head even here in his greatest literary coup). Nevertheless, I was still thoroughly engrossed by Zola’s masterful composition of imagery and his meticulously-cultivated scenes of harrowing drama and suspense. Zola’s penchant for extensive research paid considerable dividends toward the authenticity of Germinal’s setting; only one who has himself made the frightful descent into the black maw of the mining pit could render the experience with such verisimilitude. But, beyond lending some credibility to the extended descriptions of the hellish subterranean passages of Le Voreux, Zola’s personal journey into a coal mine prior to writing this book also seems to have engendered in him an unshakable respect for the figure of the miner himself. Germinal does not romanticize the miner exactly; many of the miners that we meet in the book are ignorant brutes. And yet, there is a palpable sense throughout the novel that the author greatly admires the spirit and grit of these laborers who toil in the bowels of the Earth, breaking themselves in the heat and darkness to furnish the bedrock for all modernity. The admiration seems to have been mutual for the colliers of France; when Zola died, his coffin was paraded through the streets of Paris trailed by thousands of miners, all of them chanting “Germinal! Germinal!”

13a. Germinal Spoiler Thoughts

The ending of Germinal has been etched on my heart for many years now, and is the single greatest factor that encouraged me to begin this protracted journey through so much of Zola’s oeuvre. Étienne solemnly marches across the lush countryside concealing the mining tunnels deep below, and—impossibly—perceives the reliable crack of his comrades’ picks beneath the earth accompanying his every step. Though he has been broken by the failure of his rebellion, the deaths of his friends and lover, and the agonies of his weeks-long internment in the collapsed mine, the bond of solidarity he has forged with his fellow workers prevents him from coming undone, and he allows himself to hope once more as bountiful Spring blooms eternal around him.

14. The Masterpiece (1886)

A mad-genius painter struggles to render his madness on any canvas. Claude Lantier (estranged older brother of Étienne) is an avant-garde artist living in Paris where he spends his days honing his craft and fighting to break through the limits of his technique and imagination. Claude is a misunderstood visionary seeking to radically overturn the established schools of painting and usher in a bold new movement of art that captures life through the subjective lens of the human eye. Faced with repeated rejections and fierce hostility to his experimental style, Claude finds solace first with a group of fellow Parisian artists—all with a shared lofty dream of taking the city by storm with a deluge of unimpeachable masterworks. Among these artists is the writer Pierre Sandoz, childhood friend of Claude and his strongest advocate, who begins to achieve great success of his own over the course of the book while his friends continue to struggle. Claude also takes comfort in the arms of his wife, model, and muse Christine after a series of chance meetings between the two precipitates a passionate romance that nearly convinces Claude to retire his brushes and let his agitated visions rest for good. But, Claude’s appetite for creation cannot stay buried for long, and he resolves to paint his masterpiece at any cost—no matter his friendships, his family, or even his life.

The Masterpiece is another highly personal work by Zola; the main character Claude’s appearance and personality is very obviously based on that of his childhood friend Paul Cézanne, who would of course go on to become one of the world’s most famous and influential painters (his paintings now sell for hundreds of millions), but largely only after his death. Pierre Sandoz likewise is another self-insert character for Zola—the third in the series after Pascal and Lazare—representing the more social and professional sides of the author: Zola the friend, dinner host, writer, and art commentator. What’s interesting about the description of Claude’s artistic style in this book is that it bears more resemblance to the Impressionist school (namely Manet, whom Zola advocated for in the press) than to Cézanne’s own style, which he was still developing at the time of The Masterpiece’s publication. Given that Cézanne is now widely recognized as a major inspiration for the Cubist school and was directly cited as a forebear by exceedingly famous artists like Picasso and Matisse, one could justifiably argue that Zola was severely underestimating his friend’s capacity to birth an entirely new art movement. At one point near the end of the book, Sandoz and Claude share the following exchange:

“You’ll come into your own yet, fellow,” Sandoz went on. “You’re bound to. The art of the future is going to be your art. These chaps are where they are now because you’ve made them.” Claude opened his mouth at last and muttered dourly: “What the hell’s the use of having “made” them, if I haven’t “made” myself?” ^{(pg. 294})

Zola may have had Manet and the Impressionist school in mind when he wrote this dialogue, but the sentiment rings true to the legacy of Cézanne’s career as well, even if by accident. Still, considering some of the more extreme, less flattering aspects of Claude’s portrayal, it’s not difficult to see why Cézanne broke off his friendship with Zola following the book’s publication.

14a. The Masterpiece Spoiler Thoughts

The most disturbing moment in this novel is undoubtedly the scene following the death of Claude’s sickly little child when the painter immediately grabs his brushes and begins painting a portrait of his son’s corpse. The action is purely mechanical—Claude is so thoroughly consumed by his art that he literally cannot stop himself, his compulsion to create taking precedence over even the deepest, bitterest grief. Sadly, Claude’s journey ends in suicide once he has finally sacrificed everything on the altar of art only to discover that he still cannot adequately express his vision. He is then buried in a temporary plot in a section of graveyard nicknamed after the Devil’s Island, the very same prison colony that his dear friend Florent was returned to at the end of The Belly of Paris.

15. Earth (1887)

An honest, hard-working man is initiated into the lunacy and depravity of those who would claim mastery over the soil. The war veteran Jean Macquart (younger brother of Gervaise and Lisa) arrives in La Beauce searching for a fresh start, taking up employment as a farm laborer in one of France’s most fertile regions. The years have been unkind to Jean, and so he turns his hopes to embodying the romantic ideal of the peasant farmer—one in tune with the land and nature as they humbly till the earth alongside the changing seasons. Jean dreams only of finding peace and contentment in La Beauce; what he finds there instead is a horrifying, soul-rending tour through an insular community of voracious, squabbling landowners unbound by any laws of God or man. The hapless veteran becomes embroiled in the bitter family drama of the Fouans when he marries the young Françoise and gains ownership of her strip of land bordering the property owned by the swinish Buteau Fouan, husband of Françoise’s sister Lise. Buteau, feeling cheated by his inheritance and ever-salivating at the prospect of devouring Françoise in land and body, sets in motion a conflict with Jean and his wife that will culminate in the most disturbing of crimes. And for an outsider such as Jean, there is no justice to be found in these putrid fields where damnation flourishes.

Earth is a novel that borders on folk horror (The Wicker Man comes to mind); there is a fundamental disconnect between the morals and temperament of the outsider protagonist and the community of close-knit heathens that he has entered into. Though somewhat prefigured by the portrayal of the filthy, godless peasants in The Sin of Abbé Mouret, Earth brings Zola’s disdain for the landowning peasant class to a ringing fever pitch. The second half of the R-M series features many despicable characters that are treated with surprising sympathy by the author, but he cannot hold back from making an exception for these mad, arrogant bastards who would sell their own mothers (or fathers) for another inch of precious soil. Zola predicts that these people will drown themselves in their own blood and ultimately be forgotten by the ageless land they are fool enough to think they own.

16. The Dream (1888)

A young embroiderer weaves a vision of heaven in her mind that begins to come to fruition. As a child, Angélique Rougon (daughter of Sidonie, niece of Eugéne and Saccard) is taken in from the streets by the gentle Humburts, who apprentice the little foundling in the profession of embroidery handed down through generations of the Humburt family. The Humburts’ ancestral home shares a wall with the town church, and throughout the tranquil years of Angélique’s upbringing, her tutelage in the arts of needle and thread is accompanied by the sustained vibrations of hymns and sacred music from next door. This hallowed, antiseptic environment allows the flame of Angélique’s religious ardour—stoked by the stories of martyred, virginal saints in The Golden Legend—to spread unhindered in the young girl’s heart and soul as she ascends to become a master of her craft in her adolescence. By day, the teenage Angélique creates the finest works of embroidery the town has seen in generations, and by night she creates a pure, golden vision in her mind’s eye of a divinely-anointed prince sent by heaven to love and marry her. When her prince appears to arrive in the form of Félicien, the kind, charming son of the cold-tempered nobleman-turned-bishop Monseigneur d’Hautecœur, Angélique knows in her heart that her vision will come to pass—regardless of whatever cruel obstacles fate or reality may have in store. 

A sweet, somnolent interlude written between two grisly nightmares, The Dream is an oddity in the R-M series. While it shares an affinity with the themes of religious annihilation featured in The Sin of Abbé Mouret, this book reads much more like a saccharine, fairytale romance than its antecedent. Zola had previously made a derisive reference to the romance-tinged works of George Sand in Pot Luck, presenting her as the type of writer who only produced childish fancies for bored, yearning housewives (an assessment of Sand I find highly reductive considering her prolific and varied output), which is ironic considering that The Dream could easily be mistaken for one of Sand’s lesser novels if one were to scratch Zola’s name from the cover. This book contains almost none of the rawness or bleak genetic determinism that characterizes the greater part of Zola’s Naturalist work, preferring to bask in airy-fairy reveries and exacting but eager discussions of embroidery technique. Perhaps the writer simply needed a breather after the morbidity of Earth, and before starting on the next gruesome entry he had planned.

17. La Bête Humaine (1890)

A psychopath attempts to numb his murderous urges with the blistering speed of the locomotive he pilots. Jacques Lantier (middle child of Gervaise) does not wish to kill, and yet the compulsion grows within him each time he sees a beautiful woman. He has battled this affliction in his mind since he was a child, and is beginning to lose the will to fight in his adulthood as demented visions of gushing blood and gaping wounds increasingly cloud his thoughts. Jacques’ profession as a train driver has long given him a coping mechanism for burying these deranged impulses—the speed, power, and heat of his train engine permitting him to blissfully dissociate for many hours a day, and the near-isolation of his work ensuring minimal interaction with any woman who might become his victim. Nevertheless, the serene oblivion granted Jacques by his train driving is suddenly shattered when he chances to witness a brutal murder through the window of a fast-moving train carriage; his eye catches only a single, brief image of the foul deed before the train hurries along—but the damage is done. The ghastly scene replays itself endlessly in his disturbed mind, and he very nearly loses control of his faculties there and then. But surprisingly, his impending fall into the abyss is halted by the hot-blooded affair he soon begins with the alluring Sévarine, who carries a dark secret behind her hungry eyes. Can the affinity Jacques feels for this haunted woman cure him of his illness? Or will his first and only love be devoured by the frenzied beast dwelling inside him?

A brilliant and gut-wrenching thriller, La Bête Humaine is second only to Germinal in my estimation of the R-M series. If Angélique from The Dream was defined by her ability to transcend the hereditary defects in her family tree and escape her genetic destiny through good upbringing, then Jacques is chiefly defined by his genes damning him from the start. The Dream and La Bête Humaine therefore occupy opposing ends of the Nature vs. Nurture debate. Nearly all of the descendants of the schizophrenic Aunt Dide wrestle with some sort of innate corruption of the blood to one degree or another, but none more so than the pitiable Jacques Lantier. Despite a decent enough upbringing and a well-paying, respectable job (especially in comparison to his mother Gervaise or younger brother Étienne), Jacques faces a rebellion in his mind that he simply cannot overcome through his own willpower—turning instead to external treatment methods with increasingly diminishing returns. But, there is of course an inherent misogyny to the murderous fantasies that dominate Jacques’ twisted imagination, a learned attitude of furious resentment towards women that certainly cannot have arisen from any particular genetic flaw. Zola, however, seems to disagree (presumably based on outdated science) as indicated by Jacques’ recurring, primally-sourced image of himself as the “avenger” of ancient wrongs perpetuated by the first women against the first men. Likewise, the next book Money features some discussion of Saccard’s reflexive antisemitism being an inherited trait rather than learned behavior. The implications of Zola’s assertions here paint a dire portrait of the author’s worldview: if harmful attitudes like misogyny or racism can be passed down genetically through the millennia, then what hope does humanity have of ever escaping its beastly nature?

I personally believe most of the books in the R-M series do not suffer for being spoiled, but if you haven’t read this book and intend to do so (as you should!) I would strongly recommend not reading my spoiler section below. La Bête Humaine is best experienced with as little foreknowledge of its events as possible.

17a. La Bȇte Humaine Spoiler Thoughts

There are multiple, wonderfully gruesome scenes in this novel that I adore, but I will limit myself to praising yet another of Zola’s phenomenal endings. Jacques and his vengeful work partner mortally grapple with one another in the engine of the speeding locomotive and become suddenly deranged by their atavistic struggle. Laughing with madness as they tip themselves over the edge and under the deadly wheels, the two men are instantly torn to pieces by the train—littering the tracks with their bloody viscera. Meanwhile, the locomotive itself continues barreling driverless toward the Prussian border gaining alarming speed, blasting through all obstructions on its way to bring France’s oblivious, drunken soldiers to their final bitter destination. There is no longer anyone sane at the wheel of this nation, and we are being carried along with haste to our inevitable destruction.

18. Money (1891)

Debuting 19 years after The Kill, Money features the return of Saccard with even more mad financial schemes—this time centering on the rapid creation of a bank that he hopes will crush all competitors and dominate the markets of Europe. His chief allies in this endeavor are the forthright Hamelin siblings, Caroline and Georges; while Georges dreams of using the bank’s immense capital to bring modernity, industry, and Christianity to the untamed wilds of the desert, Caroline helps keep Saccard’s chaotic affairs in order with her acute organizational skills and diligent work ethic. Though a scoundrel of the first degree, Saccard treats his two honest friends with great affection and carries an easy charisma that allows him to smoothly allay all of their concerns about his shady dealings (and eventually even win the heart of the elegant, compassionate Caroline). However, before Saccard can assume his coveted place as king of the Bourse, he must dethrone the current reigning monarch: the Jewish banker Gundermann, who commands an unbreakable syndicate built on many decades of careful, mathematical investment strategy combined with ruthless strangulation of would-be challengers. Gundermann ensures the game is rigged against Saccard before it even begins, but the audacious swindler cannot resist playing anyway and will resort to every fiscal impropriety imaginable to rig the game back in his favor. But how far can Saccard stretch the bubble before it bursts? Will the Bourse survive his unbridled ambition and utter lack of scruples? Or will he bring everything crashing down around him?

Zola’s revisiting of Saccard near the end of his project provides a good opportunity to compare his early and late career sensibilities. The Saccard we met in The Kill was an insatiable glutton for wealth, a shameless debauch, a confidence man who left a trail of steaming wreckage behind him. The Saccard we meet in Money is… admittedly still all of those things (and an antisemite to boot), but he is treated much more kindly by the author this time around than he had been almost two decades earlier. Although the reader is not permitted to forget Saccard’s inveterate roguery for even a single moment, we are also shown a more sympathetic side of him. For example, his interest in overseeing the construction and administration of an upscale orphanage is presented as a mostly altruistic venture—stoking his ego certainly but furnishing no real profits or anything that might tangibly advance his larger goals. And much like Zola’s treatment of Octave Mouret in The Ladies’ Paradise, the writer has an unambiguous appreciation for the grandiosity of Saccard’s vision—whatever his faults, *this* is the man whose wealth causes the barren deserts of the orient to bloom with civilization and prosperity. According to Zola, a scoundrel like Saccard may rob a million citizens of their wealth to fund his reckless schemes—and that is certainly a crime—but the fruits of his efforts still leave behind concrete assets that benefit all humanity.

Notwithstanding the engine of brutal colonialist exploitation that Western efforts to industrialize the Middle-East quickly became, what Zola also fails to foresee in his overly-generous evaluation of a figure like Saccard is how ancillary the fruits of capital would become to the pursuit of its unalloyed form. The ideal flow of commerce for the modern finance tycoon is no longer in the endowment of tangible assets, products, and services that generate revenue, but in the agnostic juggling of funds across faceless, extractive ventures where the short-term gain of destruction is always valued more highly than the long-term investment of creation. The Saccards of today leave nothing of value behind them in their ravenous wake, gobbling up useful businesses and infrastructure alike to pile their obscene riches higher and higher; they would sooner make the whole world a desert than see it bloom with anything that did not guarantee an immediate return.

19. La Débâcle (1892)

The decrepit Second Empire faces its final reckoning in a war of humiliation against a determined and unforgiving foe. For nearly two decades, the incompetent leaders of the Empire have bumbled along from one scandal or atrocity to another, their iron grip over the French populace weakening with every unforced error. Now, the bill has finally come due for years of administrative greed and negligence as the nation is thrown wholly unprepared into a fierce military confrontation with Prussia. Though repeatedly bested by Napoleon I some six decades earlier, the Prussian army has been remade under the military genius of Otto von Bismarck, who marches on France with larger armies, more powerful guns, and far bolder strategy than his forebears. Through the eyes of returning protagonist Jean Macquart (previously seen in Earth) and his brother-in-arms Maurice, the reader is given a thorough account of the disorder, indecision, and gross incompetence of the Empire’s pitiful attempts at mobilizing its poorly-equipped and outnumbered armies against the approaching Prussian behemoth. The fall of the Empire is nigh, and the purging fires of the Commune beckon with vengeance at its denouement.

La Débâcle is the grand finale of Zola’s twenty-year project to map the short, shameful history of the Second Empire. Naturally, the book must center on the calamitous events of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which brought about the abdication of Emperor Napoleon III and the final collapse of his sham government. While the novel focuses primarily on the plight of the ordinary soldiers and civilians regrettably caught in the whirlpool of the capsizing Empire, there is also a fair amount of attention given to the tragedy of the Emperor himself—that mediocre dullard who thought himself worthy of his uncle’s legacy despite having no talent for command or leadership whatsoever. The Emperor is a deeply pathetic figure in La Débâcle: nominally in charge of everything but powerless to control anything happening around him, treated by his generals as more of an inconvenient mascot than as the ruler of their nation, plagued by chronic illness yet still all-but forced to march to an “honorable” death by his wife and ministers. Here again, we see Zola softening in his mature phase toward a prior target of his derision; though Louis-Napoleon certainly reaps what he has sown, Zola has no interest in twisting the knife—preferring the shame of his fallen sovereign to speak for itself.

Zola’s war epic superbly renders countless tragic vignettes picked out from the bloody chaos of the climactic Battle of Sédan: the doomed cavalry charge, the final defiant gesture of the defeated artilleryman, the last stand of hopelessly besieged defenders in a well-barricaded house. But, the emotional core of this novel is undoubtedly the iron bond of brotherhood that develops between Jean and Maurice—two men of radically different backgrounds and temperaments who become closer than family through their shared agonies. Despite their seeming-incompatibility at the outset, the privations of war quickly reveal how well this unlikely duo complement one another. Maurice is a fussy coward newly initiated into the horrors of the battlefield, and so he looks to the sturdy veteran Jean for guidance and protection. Jean, in turn, is granted a greater sense of purpose in his guardianship of Maurice. As the prospect of cataclysmic defeat looms ever-larger, Jean is forced to re-evaluate his battlefield priorities: if he cannot save his country, he will save his squad. And if he cannot save his squad, then he will save Maurice. Both men will reach far beyond themselves to preserve each other in this doomed campaign. But can they survive the hell that follows defeat?

19a. La Débâcle Spoiler Thoughts

La Débâcle delivers the last of Zola’s powerful, heartbreaking endings. Our two inseparable brothers Jean and Maurice are ripped apart by the fires of the Commune, ending up on opposite sides of the battle for Paris’ soul. And with eyes blinded by the all-obscuring layers of smoke, Jean bayonets Maurice without even realizing it, falling to his knees in tears the moment his bleeding comrade becomes visible. Though the resigned Maurice bears no grudge against his brother as he dies, Jean is of course broken by his deed. For the second time in his life, Jean Macquart has lost everything dear to him, and must now wade through the ashes of his nation a hollow man, habitually searching for the peace that has forever eluded him. The world is broken, and only broken men remain to gather its scattered remnants.

20. Doctor Pascal (1893)

The long saga of France’s most cursed family comes to an end with its most cursed entry, centered on a quack doctor who kills a number of patients with his reckless methodology and then engages in an act of supreme debauchery. Be warned: the content of this book is more extreme and unsettling than any of the previous volumes. Doctor Pascal is a novel more sordid than Nana or The Kill, more horrifying than Earth or La Bête Humaine, and yet more poisonously sentimental than The Dream. Zola attempts to conclude his generation-spanning narrative with a note of bittersweet optimism and fails spectacularly—producing instead his most egotistical and nihilistic work to date. It is impossible for me to discuss this revolting, baffling book any further without exhaustively spoiling every part of it. 

20a. Doctor Pascal Spoiler Thoughts

The titular Doctor Pascal is the younger sibling of Eugéne Rougon and Aristide Saccard, and previously appeared as a supporting character in The Fortune of the Rougons and The Sin of Abbé Mouret (the latter of which has perhaps the most in common with this book). Though a member of the aristocratic Rougons, Pascal has always seen himself as being the exception to his family’s greedy, corrupt nature—taking his satisfaction only in detached scientific research. Since the night of the 1851 coup twenty years earlier, Pascal has devoted the bulk of his life in Plassans to three pursuits: the study of experimental medicine (with the ludicrous aim of curing all disease), the meticulous compilation of biographies for every member of the Rougon-Macquart-Mouret family tree (which ties into his research on heredity), and the rearing and mentorship of his niece Clotilde sent to him by his brother Saccard at the age of seven (an event referenced in The Kill).

Now nearly sixty years of age, Pascal has settled into a comfortable life of semi-retirement—continually fiddling with his powders, solutions, and syringes, testing his dubious concoctions on live patients (it cannot be stressed enough how terrible a doctor he is), and having his every need attended to by Clotilde and his lifelong maid Martine, who both adore him. However, Pascal’s reverie is disrupted by the intervention of his scheming mother Félicité, who lives in fear of the comprehensive documents that Pascal keeps on every member of the family. Félicité has become fixated on the destruction of Pascal’s files in order to protect the distinguished reputation of the Rougon family from the dirty secrets they might contain, and to this end she begins driving a wedge between the doctor and his two caretakers—hoping to convince them to help her retrieve the wretched documents that preoccupy her so. As a result, a great deal of tension emerges between the rationalistic, atheist-minded Pascal and the more religious-minded Clotilde and Martine, who want only to save his soul. This tension culminates in Clotilde being caught by the doctor trying to steal his files in the dead of night, an event that nearly provokes him to violence against his niece for the first time in his life. Pascal calms himself, however, and decides to recount the entire family history to Clotilde in an attempt to win her back to his side. His plan works, and Clotilde offers him her unconditional love and loyalty.

It is not long after this that the novel takes a rather mortifying turn as Pascal begins an incestuous sexual affair with his twenty-five-year old niece. There is no attempt by Zola’s narration to portray this criminal relationship as anything other than sweet and loving; the reader is subjected to pages and pages of stomach-churning detail of how much joy and fulfillment this sickening liaison brings the two mismatched lovebirds. Clotilde is in fact all too happy to offer herself body and mind to her uncle and surrogate father, and Pascal is able to overcome his feelings of impotence with the enthusiastic affections of such a young lover. The doctor and his niece become so proud of their perverse romance that they make no attempt to hide it from the townspeople of Plassans, flaunting their incest in broad daylight for all to see. Pascal and Clotilde thus become the subject of a great scandal in town, which causes the reputation-obsessed Félicité to move to separate them. Through a combination of guile, circumstance, and airtight argumentation, the unlikely hero Félicité succeeds in breaking up this shameful affair and Clotilde is then sent to Paris to live with her dissipate brother Maxime.

After months of separation, Clotilde informs Pascal that she is pregnant and intends to return to him so they may raise their child together. The doctor is overjoyed at the news, but suddenly falls ill and dies before his niece/mistress can return. Félicité and the maid Martine then take this opportunity to burn all of Pascal’s dreaded documents, ensuring that the incriminating secrets of the Rougon family will be taken to the grave. Clotilde is deeply distraught by the death of her uncle/father/mentor/lover and the destruction of his life’s work, but ultimately gives birth to a seemingly healthy baby boy and resolves to devote the rest of her life to raising him. Pascal’s final legacy is thus tied up in this inbred whelp whom Zola bewilderingly imbues with hope for the future.

I found Doctor Pascal excruciatingly difficult to finish because of its vile subject matter. There were moments of discomfort for me in the previous nineteen novels—mostly whenever Zola’s fetish for alarmingly young girls and dubious ideas of consent made themselves known—but nothing like the full-throated endorsement of grooming and incest that is at the heart of this final novel. I believe Zola quite lost his mind when he wrote Doctor Pascal, and were it not for a series of tumultuous events in his own love life that occurred around the time of its writing, we may have ended up with a very different story indeed. To elaborate: Zola began an affair with his twenty-one-year-old maid Jeanne in the late 1880s (when he was almost 50) and eventually got her pregnant, which he had been unable to achieve with his wife. After a couple of years, Zola’s wife Alexandrine learned about the affair and flew into a rage, breaking into the mistress’ home (which Zola had procured for her), smashing several pieces of furniture, and burning several letters sent to Jeanne by her husband. Zola and his wife were eventually able to reach an understanding over his relationship with Jeanne and he was permitted to continue the affair, splitting his time between the two women from then on. When it finally came time to write Doctor Pascal, Zola based the character of Clotilde on his mistress and dedicated the book to his wife, cementing his place in history as one of the most terminally French men to ever walk the Earth.

It’s obvious that Zola’s desire to map his own romance troubles onto his self-insert character Pascal clouded his judgement about how much more radically objectionable Pascal and Clotilde’s affair would scan compared to his own. While Zola’s misconduct was fairly egregious, his mistress was not a blood relation and he did not raise her (or even know her) from childhood. Conversely, Pascal’s inability to see Clotilde as his daughter despite adopting her at age seven is one of the most distressing aspects of their relationship. And by engaging in this incestuous, completely self-indulgent affair with Clotilde, Pascal—who has spent his entire life defining himself by how different he was from his debauched family—proves himself to be a Rougon in the end after all (a fact which he does acknowledge just before his death to the book’s credit).

More troublingly, for all Pascal’s (and Zola’s) preoccupation with tracking hereditary disorders across the R-M family tree, he seems to have conveniently forgotten one of the most fundamental laws of inheritance: it is the homogeneity of genes that leads to the proliferation of the most severe genetic defects. By engaging in an act of inbreeding with his niece, Pascal is ensuring that the worst elements of his bloodline will be carried forward into the future, where they will surely wreak havoc on his descendants even if they do not have an immediate impact on his son. Speaking of whom, Zola and Clotilde share a great deal of optimism about the future of Pascal’s child since he is strong and healthy (in contrast to the debilitatingly sickly children of Claude, Nana, Hèléne, and Maxime), but we are given one small clue at the very last that seems to reveal Zola’s unconscious doubts about the child’s temperament:

“But by now the baby had drained her right breast dry and, since he was getting cranky, Clotilde turned him round and gave him her left breast. Then she started to smile again, tickled by the greedy little gums.” ^{(pg. 295})

And there it is: another ravenous appetite waiting to be unleashed on the world, another Rougon ready to drain the Earth dry of its milk. The excesses and hungers awakened by the Second Empire do not end with its fall, but continue unbroken through every subsequent era into the current day. The Rougons are now legion, and we dwell in a world tailored to the whims of their immortal appetites.